Tuesday, 26th December 2017

My Internet Mea Culpa. Rick Webb asks “What if we were wrong?” about the internet leading to enormous benefit for humankind. I’ve been worrying about this a lot recently: it turns out the internet provides tools that allow bad people to spread lies, propaganda and discrimination with lethal effectiveness. It’s hard to believe that universal access to the sum of all human knowledge can have negative effects, but there are clearly a whole load of negative effects that us internet utopians failed to predict. # 2:59 pm

First King Tut went to the British Museum in 1972, where over 1.7 million people went to see him. Then in June 1974, with the threat of Watergate and impeachment hanging over him, Richard Nixon signed a bilateral trade agreement that Henry Kissinger had negotiated with President Sadat of Egypt. One of its terms: that King Tut would come to America. Two years later, with Nixon gone under the darkest of clouds, he did.

Computer latency: 1977-2017 (via) Dan Luu used a 240 fps camera to investigate the latency between hitting a key and having the character show up on the display across four decades of computing devices... and found 1983’s Apple IIe outperformed everything else. He goes to great lengths to explain why in his accompanying write-up. # 12:28 am